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1980 ’S VISION IS STILL
RELEVANT TODAY
The focus of this issue of tv-bay –
acquisition – takes me back to the very
beginning of my involvement in broadcast
by Peter Savage
I n the late 1980s,
the whole of the
broadcast world
changed for what, I
believe, was the better.
The BBC introduced Producer Choice,
which meant that commissioners of
programmes were for the first time
allowed to look outside the BBC to
make programmes. A consequence
was that people could employ
freelancers, rather than having to rely
on heavily-unionised staff, and it was
this new direction that probably led to
the strikes at TV-am in 1987.
Inspiration and vision in 1988
In 1988 I set up a leasing company,
Fineline. We financed a camera for a
customer and I did as all good sales
people should do – I spoke to the
dealer and asked whether he had any
other customers. That dealer was
John Quincey who traded as Visual
Impact out of his friend’s mother’s
living room in Teddington which,
spookily, was where I lived. There
started a friendship that has endured
for 25 years.
The first customer John introduced
me to was a picket line busting TV-
am cameraman called Phil Baxter (of
CVP) who inadvertently gave me the
blueprint for my business. The camera
he wanted to buy was £30,000 from
Visual Impact. He was paying £1,800
a month in hire charges and my lease
cost was £1,000 a month. “It is purely
an economic argument, Savage,” he
said. “I don’t like borrowing money
but you can make me more money by
leasing me that camera”. And there
started another 25-year long friendship
that was so tragically brought to an
early end last month.
But his and John’s visions live on and,
I believe, are even more relevant in
today’s market.
42 | TV-BAY MAGAZINE: ISSUE 82 OCTOBER 2013
A simple equation
In the ‘80s there was limited choice
in cameras, and they were really
expensive. Shooting kits were
probably £60,000 to £70,000,
especially when broadcast turned
digital. Meanwhile, dealers in the UK
were making cameras available at
well below the listed manufacturer
price. A simple equation of hire
cost versus lease cost showed
which made most economic sense.
Leasing not only made the cameras
affordable, it also meant cameramen
could become owner-operators, or
even set themselves up as small
hire companies, breaking the two
strangleholds of the day: internal
staff costs and the hire companies.
Today the market is different. There
has been a proliferation of cameras
at really affordable prices, but there
are so many of them that the former
economic argument doesn’t work,
as one day you will be shooting
on this format and the next day on
another. Hire companies are holding
20 or 30 different cameras and, yes,
leasing for the owner-operator of
these types of camera is limited.
However, there are still cameras
such as the Alexa XT or Sony F55
that, at around the £25,000 to
£30,000 mark, are the same price
as camera bodies were at the end
of the ‘80s. Add a half-set of prime
lenses and it takes the cost above
the £100,000 mark. So, despite 25
years of technical development and
three changes of main format, we
are back at the same place: how
much does it cost to hire versus
how much does it cost to buy using
finance? More vision
This brings me round to the last of
the visionaries I met in 1988: Steve
Green. Steve runs the hire company
Video Europe. He used the cost
of buying argument to buy huge
amounts of stock, especially DVW-
A500s in the ‘90s, but he also took
on board the “stack ‘em high, sell
‘em cheap” philosophy followed by
Jack Cohen of Tesco and worked
out that, if he hired his stock out
at £150 a day when everyone was
hiring out at £300, then so long as
everything was out on hire, he would
make more money than if he had
half his decks on the shelf. If you
spotted and picked the product of
the moment, and had large amounts
of stock out at cheaper prices, you
would make great money.
He has stuck rigidly to that model
with DVW, SRW and 2K. Those of
you who hire cameras and decks at
£150 a day have a lot to thank him
for, even if he is not the favourite
person with other hire companies.
When to hire, when to buy
In summary, I have been very lucky
to have worked with some of the
very best visionaries in the broadcast
markets – the people who, between
them, have shaped both the hire and
sales camera markets as they are
today and whose argument, despite
everything, still stands the test of
time: “if your monthly hire cost is
more than the lease cost, then buy;
otherwise hire”. Phil Baxter RIP.
If you would like to know more about leasing and how we work with
broadcast companies, do contact me at peter.savage@azule.co.uk and/or
write to the tv-bay editor. To read more of these articles, see our website:
www.azule.co.uk